$100,000 Reward Renewed in Santa Clara Cold Case Murder

Matt Flores was murdered at work 22 years ago. This week, authorities reissued a six-figure reward to help solve the case.

8:11am —Matt Flores drove a rented Chevrolet Corsica into the parking lot of his new Applied Materials job the morning of March 24, 1994.

The 26-year-old engineer and Rhode Island native had been hired by the Santa Clara company just weeks before, fresh out of the Army and ready to start a new life in Silicon Valley with his wife, Denise, and his infant daughter, Danielle.

8:15am — Flores was dead, shot execution-style, a point-blank bullet to the head.

Clues to what happened that day are nearly nonexistent—not even a shell casing was found. But surveillance tape shows a dark two-door Ford Explorer circling the lot 20 minutes before Flores arrived and driving off 20 seconds after the shooting.

Twenty-two years later the murder remains unsolved, despite a $100,000 reward offered right after Flores’ death and again in 2011.

On Monday, authorities announced that Applied Materials has reissued the six-figure incentive.

“It can be easy to let these sorts of cases slip into the background,” said Santa Clara County Supervisor Joe Simitian, who has taken a personal interest in the case. “But we should remember that to Matt’s friends and family, this case is just as important today as it was more than 20 years ago.”

In 2011, the reward generated new leads, all dead ends. Five years later, Flores’ family asked his former employer to offer it once more to renew interest in the case.

The timing is especially poignant, Simitian noted, because Flores’ daughter, who’s 22 now and never knew her dad, graduated college with honors only a week ago.

“Someone out there may have that thread of information that will help us unravel this mystery,” Rosen said. “[The] $100,000 [reward] is a lot of money for a name. For Matthew Flores’ family that name means justice, and justice is priceless.”

Santa Clara police Chief Michael Sellers said that even though it’s a cold case, his detectives continue searching for leads.

“We’ll be working on this until the day we can call Matt’s family and give them the answers they’ve been looking for,” he said.

Police ask anyone with information about the case to call the Santa Clara police tip line at 408.241.9495. For a deep dive into the case, read this Mercury News article originally published two years after the killing.

The reason the case remains unsolved is because the motive, if one even exists, is so elusive. The police investigators, operating under the assumption that a motive did exist, tracked down every conceivable lead and identified a number of unlikely possibilities but nothing promising. The only “elephant in the room” in the Flores’ case is the thing the dedicated investigators feared most: that the killing was the result of mistaken identity — with nothing to connect the killer to the victim, as that would, absent an acquaintance of the killer’s coming forward, render the case unsolvable.

As for the motives of the anti-police fanatic Jack “The Giant Hemorrhoid” Slade, they are as obvious as they are lame.